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Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowd-working platform that pays people small sums to take part in menial tasks, such as tagging photos or filling out forms. Essentially it is a way to get humans to perform robotic jobs that machines can’t yet manage – but now the bots are getting their revenge by taking on the tasks themselves.
That is a problem, because MTurk is widely used by scientists as a cheap way to carry out research. University of Minnesota social psychologist Hui Bai was using …